Search

open access article In this short paper, we develop the case for moving away from the concept of a smart city in which the focus tends to be on shifting managerial responsibility onto computers. We offer the alternative conception of the city as an ecosystem, a complex adaptive system, and draw upon the biology of cognition to construe cognition as the skilful adaptation to living sustainably. Such skilful adaptations necessitate human operators and managers themselves to both develop necessary systemic redundancy to withstand future shocks, but also to acquire skills in multi-faceted domains and disciplines, including the use of Artificial Intelligence, to simulate future scenarios and to plan accordingly. To attain such skills and competencies, we briefly outline a viable and relevant transdisciplinary pedagogy for future city managers to develop smart sustainable cities.

open access article Social housing corporations play an important role in society as they provide affordable and good-quality housing for vulnerable citizens. Yet, the sector has to deal with the historical legacy of a high number of old and poorly insulated buildings. While research into the processes that drive or hinder business model innovation in this sector is scarce, this paper draws upon multiple qualitative case studies of social housing in the Netherlands to identify critical success factors for the transition to sustainable business models for new buildings and retrofits. Results show that there are four key attributes for a successful transition process: collaboration (both with supply chain partners as well as other social housing associations); continuous innovation; vision; and the role of the government (including subsidies and fiscal regulations). While economic performance was an important boundary condition, sustainability was not always seen as a strategic organizational objective, a finding that might be explained through considering the legacy of social housing corporations. Furthermore, a number of barriers were identified including the need for customer acceptance, a lack of support from the construction sector and government and macroeconomic factors such as increased construction costs.

This presentation deals with the role of the Agricultural Bank in the Jafara region to the South-west of Tripoli City in addressing the challenges of poverty, hunger, poor health and well-being, and climate change or not. The study reveals that the Agricultural Bank has inadequate financial resources to improve the infrastructure, production and level of prosperity among farmers in the agricultural sector of the region.

Farmers and rural communities in developing countries encounter a broad range of challenges, including poverty, hunger, poor health and well-being, and climate change. In relation to sustainable agricultural development, farmers need to apply appropriate farming techniques and agricultural technologies that require a high level of investments. In Libya, the Agricultural Bank was founded to promote agricultural development that is both sustainable and improves the living standard of rural communities and farmers’ welfare. The present study is focused on the role of the Agricultural Bank in the Jafara region to the South-west of Tripoli City in addressing the challenges of poverty, hunger, poor health and well-being, and climate change or not. Based on a mixed method approach, including 83 surveys and 26 interviews with farmers in the region, the study reveals that the Agricultural Bank has inadequate financial resources to improve the infrastructure, production and level of prosperity among farmers in the agricultural sector of the region. The paper concludes with some practical recommendations regarding how government and the Agricultural Bank can more effectively support sustainable agricultural development in the Jafara region and other rural area of Libya.

open access journal Background: Community-based sustainability transitions projects are increasingly being considered for their potential as policy delivery vehicles for the UK government Climate Change Act commitments. At the same time, project funders seek reassurances that their investments are relevant in helping communities mitigate, and adapt to, the effects of climate change. Despite this increased pressure, recent research suggests that evaluations of such sustainability transitions projects have, on the one hand variable impacts, or impacts that are of an inadequate scale, duration, or type, or on the other, that project staff lack the capacity or resources to undertake monitoring and evaluation to the degree of rigour expected by policy makers and funders. Purpose: This article reports on an extended case study of a fully-funded five year community-based sustainability transitions project in Leicestershire, England. In particular, it reviews the deployment of developmental evaluation (DE) methods in an attempt to capture the project team’s learning about doing community-based sustainability work. Setting: A funded community-based sustainability transitions project in a south Leicestershire market town. Intervention: Developmental evaluation methods were used to capture project-based learning as a resource for project innovation and adaptation. Research Design: Phronetic case study. Data Collection and Analysis: Participant-observation, action research, focus and special issue group facilitation. Findings: Use of a developmental evaluation method identified key learning points for the project actors; these focused on how the project had adapted to the complexities of the operating environment through innovations in second-order learning or learning how to learn. The paper makes recommendations for the design and funding arrangements of community-based sustainability transitions initiatives and developmental evaluation is endorsed as a viable and promising adjunct to more traditional impact, economic, and process evaluation methodologies.

What’s being tested and what’s being learnt? A contribution to lessons learned evaluation methods for community-based sustainability initiatives. Abstract: Aim: There is little good practice guidance with respect to methods and skills for conducting lessons learned evaluations of community-based development projects. In this paper we utilise a mixed methods approach to evaluate the lessons learned by the team members and stakeholders of a funded five year ‘test-and-learn’ UK-based sustainability initiative. The approach combines a statistical and a qualitative thematic analysis of transcribed textual data and presents an analytic framework with which to track the lessons learned by community development projects. Design/ Research methods: A mixed methods approach combining text and sentiment mining complemented by a qualitative thematic analysis is applied to the same data collected from stakeholder responses to an on-line survey and the transcribed audio recordings of four focus groups in which stakeholders participated. Conclusions/ findings: Employing replicable tools, augmented by qualitative research methods, provide a framework for a systematic approach to elicit and capture lessons learned by a sustainable community development project. These bear on how project activities, from engagement to supporting the local food economy, have been experienced by stakeholders and their learning acquired over the course of the project. Implications for future project design and funding options are considered. Originality/ value of the article: Despite the evident value of its contribution to improving project design and funding options, the evaluation of lessons learned in community-based sustainability work remains under-researched. The novel combination of text and sentiment mining techniques with more traditional qualitative thematic analysis on the same data offers an original contribution to research in this field. JEL: R58, Q01, Z18

Moves towards reducing the carbon footprint of new buildings require a new way of thinking. Design research suggests that the development of more innovative and sustainable solutions increasingly highlight the benefits arising from the integration and participation of multiple actors with a wide range of technical and contextual knowledge and expertise. The need to address complex problems more systematically has escalated the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships between stakeholders (Coley and Lemon, 2009). It is also becoming more widely accepted that the inter-connected dynamics of a system’s component parts is what determines its complexity suggesting that a holistic approach to problem solving cannot always rely on conventional methods. A mechanical problem is typically broken down into its parts before being able to systematically solve the problem piece by piece. Whilst this is powerful for some problems, and often requires extensive knowledge that aligns with the complicatedness of the task, complex issues, invariably involving people and their relationship with other actors (not necessarily human), do not lend themselves to such a reductionist approach. The design and subsequent operation of a school is one such complex phenomenon that requires a holistic approach which acknowledges the process of continual change that emerges from these interrelationships and patterns (Anarow, Greener et.al., 2003); it also requires collaboration, partnership and trust. This chapter will return to the Keystones on School Community Collaboration that emerged from the ENSI-CoDeS project (Collaboration of schools and communities for Sustainable Development, 2011-2014) and are summarised and reflected upon, with examples, in Espinet and Zachariou (2014). It will focus on the continuation of city based collaborations in the UK (Leicester)that were designed to ensure that the legacy of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Programme was one of enhanced sustainability facilitated through collaboration and partnership. The next section will summarise the BSF programme and will introduce the projects that will be considered alongside the CoDeS Keystones. The Keystones will then be introduced alongside examples derived from the projects and a final concluding section will explore what these projects and the Keystone concepts might tell us about the generic capabilities that have been introduced above and might underpin such collaboration in very different contexts.

Smart grid research has tended to be compartmentalised, with notable contributions from economics, electrical engineering and science and technology studies. However, there is an acknowledged and growing need for an integrated systems approach to the evaluation of smart grid initiatives. The capacity to simulate and explore smart grid possibilities on various scales is key to such an integrated approach but existing models – even if multidisciplinary – tend to have a limited focus. This paper describes an innovative and flexible framework that has been developed to facilitate the simulation of various smart grid scenarios and the interconnected social, technical and economic networks from a complex systems perspective. The architecture is described and related to realised examples of its use, both to model the electricity system as it is today and to model futures that have been envisioned in the literature. Potential future applications of the framework are explored, along with its utility as an analytic and decision support tool for smart grid stakeholders.